How do four interns working for just 10 weeks hope to build a comprehensive inventory of medical equipment in a dozen public hospitals and clinics and have it make a difference in the effectiveness of those facilities?  They get help.

We are but a small piece of a much larger initiative between Rice, Texas Children’s Hospital, Jimma University, Tegbare id, and AIHA.  As such, we have been incredibly fortunate to be able to use the resources from all of these programs to help prepare us for our trip and the technical details of our internship.  Through contacts at Rice we arranged a trip to visit Medical Bridges, a global health outreach group, to learn about equipment repair and the medical equipment needs of developing world countries.  From there we also got the chance to meet with Sunny Sharma, the owner of Sunbelt Medical Corporation, a local medical repair and distribution company.  He told us about his experiences working in low resource settings and gave us some leads on resources we could use to learn how to diagnose and repair basic equipment failures.

We also got the opportunity to meet with Samantha Jacques at TCH and get a hospital tour to learn how to identify equipment in the wild.  She was able to take us through most of the relevant departments at Texas Children’s and showed us many different examples of different types of equipment we could come across in the Ethiopian hospitals.

As a sidenote, we also got to wear scrubs for the day.  We proceeded to buy team scrubs that night.